&ldquo;IIT Jodhpur is committed to impart quality education to facilitate the creation of qualified, competent and responsible human resources to meet the emerging technological challenges of the world. It is working towards creating an equitable learning platform that is positive, accessible and effective in the face of the modern societal and scientific advancements.

Flexibility in curriculum, in all its academic programs, encompassing elements of teaching, research, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship is the most unique feature of IIT Jodhpur. The Department of Science and Technology (DST), under the National Mission on Cyber Physical Systems, has identified IIT Jodhpur as a Technology &amp; Innovation Hub in the area of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The institute has also been nominated as the coordinator for the Jodhpur City and Knowledge Cluster by the Office of Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India.

The sprawling 852-acre IIT Jodhpur campus is a majestic tribute to the deep-rooted diverse cultural heritage of the region. The campus is an architectural masterpiece, which is slated to become an international exemplar of sustainability with net-zero energy, and advanced water and waste management strategies.&rdquo;

IIT Jodhpur

Our study is based on a workplace ethnography conducted between Jan-May 2020 in an AI research lab of an Indian service-based IT organization, whose operations shifted from co-located work to work from home (WFH) owing to the recent pandemic. The field notes of the ethnographer, working as a full-time intern in a running AI project within this lab, is the basis for the qualitative data for this study. We discuss the socio-technical aspects and the specific challenges of distributed team-working due to the WFH norms facing such emerging research units, which are rapidly diffusing across the IT industry in the offshoring context, particularly in India. We rely on work system theory as a map to bring out key findings from our ethnographic observations. The findings point to the importance of having workflows compatible with the specific work roles in such emerging work systems – particularly for the beginner roles in the AI space. Our study contributes to the IS literature by depicting the challenges of distributed teams in a relatively novel setting emerging in offshoring contexts like the Indian IT sector, and suggests implications for managers handling AI projects and tackling employee-focused Human Resource practices in such settings. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Center of Technology Foresight and Policy (CTFP)

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Information Systems Frontiers

Work Systems in the Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry Delivering Artificial Intelligence (AI) Solutions and the Challenges of Work from Home

Based on a four-month ethnography in a research unit of an Indian Information Technology (IT) services organization, we explore mobility prospects of engineers in emerging technology work-roles. Indian IT sector in its traditional software and business process services avatar not only aligned with skills expected from IT-related engineering streams such as IT and Computer Science, but also contributed to mobility of engineers irrespective of their prior engineering streams, moulding them into 'generic programmers'. In this study, we explore if the prospects for mobility are any different in this sector as it transitions into providing emerging technology solutions. We illustrate some of the mobility constraints that engineers from non-IT specializations face while accessing emerging technology work-roles, and discuss these findings through a critical realist lens. Our findings depict the importance of IT vs non-IT backgrounds as an important divide for the Indian IT sector as it segues into emerging technologies. © AMCIS 2021.

27th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2021

Indian information technology (IT) engineers transitioning to work roles in emerging technologies: Findings from an ethnographic study

Over the past four decades, Indian Information Technology (IT) industry has been delivering traditional software and BPM (Business Process Management) services to its clients across the globe. Providing cost-optimized, yet high-quality services following standard process methodologies has made it an attractive destination to clients across industry verticals. Today, the challenge before this industry is to provide emerging technology solutions to clients in their digital transformation drive. Situated at this pivotal juncture in its journey, the ‘work from home’ (WFH) norm during to the recent COVID-19 pandemic posits challenges of a new kind for this sector. We explore these challenges based on our four-month ethnographic study (Jan-May, 2020) in a service-based IT organization situated in Bengaluru, which over the past five years has been developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions to its clients. © 2020, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

Emerging Technologies and Emergent Workplaces: Findings from an Ethnographic Study at an Indian IT Organization

Indian IT industry with its long history in delivering quality customized software solutions is gearing up to provide solutions around emerging technologies such as AI, to its clients. In this study, we attempt to explore this transition through the lens of affordances within the IS literature. We base our findings on a four-month ethnography, where one of us worked as a part of a team providing AI solutions in an IT organization situated in Bengaluru, India. Applying Volkoff and Strong's critical realist framework to the nature of affordances that are being actualized, we compare work practices and processes in this AI project with traditional software development. Given that these two call for different affordances, our in-situ observations parse the actualization of affordances within the organization. Our findings indicate that affordances associated with traditional software development continue to get actualized as work processes even in the context of AI projects. © ICIS 2020. All rights reserved.